The Sith Lords: A Novel
by mrbert86
Summary: Now that Bioware's pitiful conclusion to Meetra Surik's story has been stricken from canon, the Jedi Exile finally has a chance at receiving a truly satisfying treatment in the form of a novel based on her life. This is my attempt to create that novel. Rated M for some intense depictions of war violence.
1. Prologue

Notes: This prologue is an experiment to gauge interest in the project. If there is a significant response, I will be sure to continue the story and update in the near future. If not, I may choose to abandon it based on my own continuing interest in the story. I will be significantly abridging certain parts of the story and highly editing others to make the sequence of events flow more like a novel than a video game. In addition, I will be heavily editing the majority if not all of the dialogue in the game. This is not because I have any problem with KOTOR 2's dialogue, but rather because I feel that to copy and paste the game's dialogue into the story would break the immersion of the story and force the reader to picture the events, locations and characters as they are represented in the game rather than as real characters in a novel. I will be making some alterations to the locations in the game as well as to some of the character's appearances for the same reason. All of the key characters from the game will be present as well as a few new ones. I hope you enjoy this first entry.

 **Prologue**

 _Two hundred meters._

He was running as fast as he could, his boots pattering against the Dxun mud with every step. Driving rain stung his face and soaked his robes. He could barely see ten feet in front of him through the torrent. A shell exploded to his left, splattering hot mud all over his face, and he saw a green-clad soldier go down screaming. He didn't stop. He couldn't stop for anything.

 _One hundred meters._

The Mandalorian line was close now. It was invisible through the relentless rain but he could feel it. Every lungful of the dry, smoky air stung inside of his chest but he kept running. He sprinted past a crater where a soldier lay clutching his thigh where he had been shot. He leapt clear over a heap of bloody corpses that had been struck by an explosive round only seconds earlier. He felt a rifle shot incoming immediately before it was fired and had just enough time to ignite his yellow lightsaber and bat it aside.

 _Twenty-five meters._

The armored silhouettes of the Mandalorian soldiers were visible now . He would be on them in seconds. He called on the Force and shot forward with impossible speed. And then suddenly he felt like he had been kicked in the back by a wookiee.

He pitched forward and his face slammed into the earth with paralyzing force. His ears were ringing so loudly that the sounds of the battle were almost completely inaudible. He was vaguely aware of a hand on his shoulder, of being rolled onto his back, and of raindrops on his face. But he couldn't see anything but blackness. His head was spinning. And he was tired. So very tired...

The last thing he ever heard was the far-away, faintly audible voice of a woman, weeping between syllables: "Orin... _please_... _No!"_

The few soldiers who happened upon that place over the next few minutes would never forget what they saw: a young Jedi knight, weeping and delirious with grief, with her arms wrapped around the burnt and mutilated body of a man whose legs had been torn off at the knees by a landmine. Her face was pressed against his body so tightly that all that could be seen of her was her soaking wet brown hair than ran halfway down her back.

Meetra Surik wept for what seemed to her like hours, her face still buried in Orin's mangled chest. The battle raged all around her but she heard and felt nothing. Nothing but the lifeless body of Orin in her shaking arms. Her eyes began to burn with tears of rage. She raised her muddy, blood-stained face from Orin's shattered body and her green lightsaber screamed to life. She was going to make them pay a hundred times over for what they had done.

And then, without warning, everything turned to black and the deafening roar of battle gave way to perfect silence with jarring abruptness. And in that silence, Meetra heard the barely audible sound of a woman's voice pronounce a single word:

" _Awaken._ "


	2. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

"If Coorta doesn't give us the signal in the next minute then I say we get out of here."

"Shut up, Juza."

"Come on, Atton! There's next to no humidity in this air and my lekku are getting irritated!"

Atton Rand shut his eyes and put his feet up on the dashboard, trying his best not to seem irritated. Juza was right, though: The recycled ship air was painfully dry. His lips were chapped, his eyes were itchy, and his right nostril was swollen and blocked with such force that he could barely see. Complaining about it, though, would only make Juza more whiny and give Atton yet another torment to add to his burdens. That wouldn't do anything to make the wait more bearable.

These two comprised the meagre crew of "The Scavenger", a worn-out Crescent X9 Courier Ship. Originally constructed for service in the Exar Kun War half a century ago, the ship was old and some of the secondary systems were becoming unreliable - namely, the air humidifier. Still, it had plenty of storage space and could move faster than appearances would suggest. For the task at hand, that was as good as they could ask for.

The comm rang and Atton sat upright as Juza slammed his orange hand down on the receiver.

"Coorta? Coorta, is that you? Dammit, Coorta, we've been out here almost an hour. Where have you been?"

Coorta panted for breath in between small jumbles of words. He sounded like he'd been running. "Sorry, guys. We've had a - couple of - complications - on this end."

"What kind of complications?" Atton interjected, more out of irritation than concern.

"Just a bit of a delay." Coorta was beginning to catch his breath. "But I think we've finally got security tied down. If you land now, you should have a straight shot to the medbay."

Atton gestured to Juza who took the controls and moved The Scavenger out from behind the asteroid where they had been hiding. "We're moving in now. What's the package this time?"

"One of the patients. Tank Fourteen."

"One of the patients!" Juza's eyes shot out of his head but he didn't stop the ship. Atton gave no response aside from a brief glare at his companion. "You didn't tell us you'd gotten into trafficking, you _schutta_!"

"It's a **Jedi** ,you idiot! And she's sedated. If you two don't mess this up, we'll all be set for life once we get to Nar Shaddaa.

Atton snatched the comm away from Juza. "We're on it. See you inside." And he cut the channel without another word. Juza didn't catch it, but the outline of a grimace briefly played across Atton's face.

The hangar was occupied by a large freighter but The Scavenger was a small ship and there was plenty of room for it to put down in the back left corner. Atton grabbed his blaster and hid it inside his coat. Juza didn't stir.

"Are we really doing this?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing...it's just...I mean...are you sure? We've never moved human cargo before."

"You know how big the bounty is for Jedi? Yeah I'm sure. Now, come on."

Juza made a gesture of assent but stayed in his seat. Atton glared at him.

"Have it your way, you idiot. At least have the engine running when I get back." And he stormed out of the cockpit, muttering curses under his breath.

He turned out of the room towards the loading ramp and a blinding beam of light shining through the window caught him right in the face. He growled under his breath and shaded his eyes with his left hand while fumbling for his pistol with the other. His fingers hesitated as he drew a twelve-charge stun magazine out of his coat. The light from the exposed core of Peragus II, several thousand miles out the back window, was a grave reminder that he couldn't use lethals here. If one stray charge hit the mining rock, the heat-sensitive fuel would explode and the whole system would go up like Republic Day on Coruscant.

"And put the ramp down!" he roared. He returned the blaster to its holster, strapped against his chest under his coat, and shut his eyes for a moment. Coorta hadn't mentioned anything about a Jedi until now. Why would he have? Atton hadn't told him about it...and a lady Jedi, at that...but the loading ramp was down. Atton steeled himself and marched out of the ship. He didn't need anything distracting him from the task at hand. He'd have plenty of time to torture himself with his recollections on the trip to Nar Shaddaa.

Atton met not even a loading droid as he crept cautiously into the center of the room. The hangar was completely deserted and the lights had all gone dark. Nobody had been in here for some hours at least.

"What kind of number did Coorta pull in here?" Attton wondered to himself. The hangar was relatively small, with gray walls that turned orange with the pervasive light of the exposed planet core. Most of the room, though, lay in the shadow of the freighter and was veiled in darkness.

Atton paused to examine the ship for a moment. He recognized the basic framework of a standard Dynamic-class freighter but almost all of its systems appeared to have undergone extensive modification. It looked like a smuggling ship. "That can't be a Telos freighter." he thought to himself. "What the hell is it doing here?"

The facility was as silent as death aside from the barely audible hum of the gravity generators and there were large cargo boxes strewn all about the room. As the silence and darkness began to work upon his nerves, Atton drew his pistol and hurried to the elevator. He kept thinking he saw silhouettes creeping amongst the cargo boxes in the darkness.

The elevator opened automatically to greet him and, much to his relief, cast a bright white light over the room behind him. As the doors closed, he put his pistol back in his jacket again and fell into an absent-minded stupor as the elevator hummed to life.

"You're at fourteen. Draw a nine, switch the face of the plus three card, total is twenty. Draw a three, put down a two, total is nineteen. Draw a four..."

Anything to keep his mind occupied. And far away from her...

The doors parted and he planted his feet in reality once again.

The administration office was brightly lit but looked just as deserted as the hangar. Directly in front of him, the large room's only window looked out on the same glowing planetary core in the distance. The room's ceiling was made up entirely of exposed asteroid rock. He had been up to this level once before and remembered that the medical bay was at the end of a long hallway to his left. He strolled down the hallway slowly and cautiously but met nobody.

"Even the medical staff? Where is everybody?"

The doors of the medical bay opened before him and he got his answer. The corridor contained several dozen rows of kolto tanks, almost all of them occupied and perhaps seven out of every ten lit by an eerie red light that showed that their patient had expired. Atton didn't even blink. The sight of death had ceased to bother him a long time ago. Relieved to have met nobody on his route, Atton opened the single unoccupied tank in the front row, opened the front panel, and plunged his head down into the warm kolto bath. His sinuses cleared up instantaneously and his eyes ceased to itch. Kolto was a wonderful thing. He emerged dripping with the warm liquid and the cold air of the medical bay on his wet skin sent a chill down his spine. Nonetheless, he found himself in infinitely higher spirits than he had been a moment ago.

"Tank Fourteen"

The tanks were arranged in rows of five and as he walked down the third row he briefly examined the corpses, still wearing their mining uniforms, suspended in the first three tanks. They each had laser burns all over their broken bodies and the second was missing an arm below the elbow. The kolto had repaired the tissue damage so that the unfortunate patients were bearable to look upon. Still, it was no help to Atton's nerves to wonder who or what on this facility had brought them to this condition. It couldn't have been an accident in the mines. That might have explained the missing arm but the laser burns indicated violence. The more of the bodies he examined, the stronger this impression became.

He was elated to find that the occupant of number fourteen was much more pleasant to look upon. A woman, perhaps in her early thirties, meagrely dressed in her white underclothes and with long, brown hair flowing down to the middle of her back. Her body was slender but muscular and strong. There were traces of recent wounds lingering on her pale skin, including one particularly nasty scar that ran horizontally across her right thigh, but they appeared to have healed well from the kolto treatment. Atton stood still for a moment, admiring the beauty of her sleeping face, and a smile danced across his lips.

"If only we could've met under different circumstances..," he thought.

He unlocked the tank hatch and the kolto drained drown through the floor. He opened the hatch then moved quickly to support her unconscious body and keep her from falling over out of the tank. As he removed the breathing mask from her face, she stirred slightly and mumbled something in her sleep as if she were trapped in a troubled dream. The touch of her wet, warm skin sent an electric shock through his body and he tensed with the memory of the last Jedi he had touched...

He recovered himself quickly, though, and hoisted her up onto his left shoulder while fumbling for his comlink with his right. "Coorta? Coorta, you there?"

Just then, the unmistakable roar of an explosion rumbled from the lower levels.

"Coorta!?" he demanded frantically. "What the hell was that?"

The commlink crackled in response. "Sorry about that, Jaq! Yeah, that was just us finishing up down here. Where are you?"

"Well what the hell are you doing down there, you _murglak_!? I'm just leaving the medbay. I've got the package."

"Great! We're heading to the elevator. We'll meet you on the way."

And the commlink cut off.

"Idiot." Atton muttered. "When we get to Nar Shaddaa, I'll kill him."

He drew his pistol with his right hand and started down the hall, staggering under his passenger's dead weight. He would've struggled to shoot down even a mouse droid if he had come across one under these circumstances but, fortunately, nothing accosted him as he stumbled down the hallway towards the elevator. At last, he entered back into the administration office and layed the Jedi down on the floor for a moment's rest while he waited for the elevator. He tried not to look at her. "Twelve, draw a five, flip the face of the plus three card, total is twenty."

After a moment the door opened. Atton turned around and froze like a statue to find Coorta aiming a pistol straight at his chest and wearing a malicious grin.

"Thanks for the help, Atton." A stun charge knocked him off his feet and then everything went black.


End file.
